


Looking Back to Look Forward.

by Cosmic_Biscuit



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drama, Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-27
Updated: 2012-09-27
Packaged: 2017-11-15 03:55:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/522869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cosmic_Biscuit/pseuds/Cosmic_Biscuit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a timeline where Amon hasn't yet been defeated, Lin visits her mother and gets a little helpful advice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Looking Back to Look Forward.

She opens her eyes, and she’s home.

Not the apartment in Republic City where she’s lived for the last decade since her promotion to Chief, but the training school where her mother taught the finest of metalbenders. Rolling out of bed, she finds that she once again stands on short, chubby legs, and when she holds her hands out to look at them, they’re small with bitten nails.

The familiar scent of spicy-sweet pan rice touches her nose, making her stomach growl, and she climbs down the ladder from her room to go to the kitchen.

Her mother is there, tall and proud and solid as the iron pan she holds over the fire, flipping the cake of rice with an expert flick of her wrist. Long black hair hangs over her shoulders in wild tangles, as it did every morning, and Lin can’t help the sharp pang that rises in her chest and throat.

She opens her mouth, momentarily forgetting her current shape, until the respectful ‘Mother’ doesn’t come out and instead is a soft, childish “Mama?”

Her mother doesn’t turn, but smiles; it’s the soft, warm one that no one else except her ever got to see. “Hey, squirt.”

Lin bites her lip, then edges into the kitchen cautiously. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

“This was your favorite memory.”

It was, wasn’t it? Her mother had always pushed the students hard, and she’d been no exception. These mornings, with just the two of them and the rice bread and no expectations for the day, had always been a rare treat. But while she knows this, that doesn’t much explain how this is happening. “Am I dreaming, or are we in the spirit world?”

“Can’t it be both?” Her mother tosses the cake into a metal pan and sets it on the table. Even though she knows this isn’t exactly real, Lin can’t help her mouth watering, and fetches a bottle of fire honey to drown it as she’d done every time she’d been allowed to have them.

The first bite almost makes her cry. Not for the first time, she regrets that she’d never learned to make these before her mother had died. 

There had always been that one little part of her that had never really believed that her mother ** _could_** die.

There’s a clank next to her as her mother sits down with the massive mug of the thick, sweet-smelling ginger and nutmeg air temple tea she’d always started her day with. They eat and sip in silence, enjoying the feel of the early-morning sun and the crisp mountain breeze.

But Lin can still remember everything, and the confession comes to her lips, unbidden and unwanted and painful. “Mama… I can’t bend anymore.”

She doesn’t know what kind of answer she’s expecting. Possibly anger; her mother has always been so proud of their talents. 

Instead, a warm, heavy, calloused hand settles on her head. “And-?” her mother asks.

Lin blinks up at her in confusion; her mother’s expression is unreadable. “What do you mean ‘and’?”

“And what are you going to do about it?”

“I’m… I’m not sure. I don’t… I don’t think I regret it, because it was for a good cause, but I can’t-“

“Tch.” Her mother flicks her ear chidingly, as she’d done so many times during training, and this time Lin manages to keep from yelping, though she still can’t help the flinch. “I thought I raised you better than that, squirt.”

“Mama?”

“You look as lost as I was once. But that was when I found my purpose. My purpose was to bend, and to pass on what I’d learned from it. And that was once yours too. Now you have to find a different one.”

Lin bites her lip, thinking, and another memory calls itself up in her mind. The scenery around them wisps like smoke, twisting itself into a new setting. They stand on a beach together, her mother’s hand on her shoulder, and two ladies in elaborate battle costumes and makeup and a man in Water Tribe garb wave at them from the entrance of a village.

Kyoshi Island. She remembers her mother’s stories of after the War, how this place had become the center of nonbender training and had been the first place to open a school of inventing and engineering. She remembers the summer spent there, of getting her ass handed to her by ladies with fans, until she learned how to fight as they did, of studying mechanical schematics and learning numbers until her brain ached.

And, suddenly, she understands.

“Hey.”

Her mother crouches beside her, a reassuring hand on her back. “Maybe you’ll be able to bend again one day. Maybe you won’t. But you know how to fight without it, you just have to remember and maybe learn some new tricks. You’ve still got a lot of people to protect, so go kick ass, baby girl.”

Lin can’t help the pricking at her eyes, but she smiles as she hugs her mother around the neck.  ”I will, Mama.”

When she opens her eyes again, she’s back in her familiar bed in her apartment. She breathes in deep, then rolls out of bed and goes to a weapons closet she hadn’t opened in years; not since her mother’s death. 

The sharpened, engraved metal fan had been a graduation present from Sokka and Suki. While she’d always liked it, she’d never found much use for it in battle, as her bending had always left the possibility of it being irreparably warped. Now, though, she tests the heft and slice of it in her hand, and smiles before tucking it into the belt of her sleeping clothes.

As she heads for the door to go to the kitchen, she notices her wire gauntlets and picks them up as well. 

First, she thinks, she’ll spend the morning teaching herself to make the spicy-sweet rice cakes. Then, perhaps, she’ll go see if the Sato girl had a little of her father’s technical ingenuity.

They’ll find a way to win this, bending or no bending. There are still battles to be fought, and she'll fight them any way she can.

Because she'd learned from her mother that a Bei Fong didn't roll over and give up that easily, not even to death.


End file.
